- It’s a good thing that plot description doesn’t describe nearly every other movie about post-apocalypses.
- No explanation is given as to what caused said apocalypse, so I like to think that Man and Boy are living in a world where The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn was indeed made into a movie and, not being able to contain the sheer volume of OMGWTFBBQ of that story, the planet consumed all of humanity as a punishment for crimes against art, decency, and good taste.
So here’s the deleted scene of The Road‘s apocalypse:
Breaking Dawn is going to be a magnificent clusterfuck and I am crossing my fingers that they actually make it. I am starting my stockpiling of non-perishable goods in preparation.
- Speaking of which, although the food scenes were the only scenes any kind of product placement could be squished in, I did think it was smart that whoever stocked the underground fallout shelter chose to purchase that vitamin bottled water. I’ve previously thought water with vitamins added in was stupid, but I guess if you’re starving to death perhaps it’s useful. I will revise my opinion to have an apocalypse contingency.
I’d be pretty thrilled to find a can of Coke ten years after the apocalypse, though, not gonna lie.
- Viggo Mortensen’s character, Man, is clearly someone who has spent a lot of time thinking about the
zombieapocalypse given that his immediate reaction to what I imagine were off-screen fires and brimstone in the streets was to fill up the bathtub with water in advance of utilities being shut off. That’s not just quick thinking, that’s the work of a man who has been thinking about this eventuality for quite some time. My reaction would have been closer to Charlize Theron’s: “Why are you taking a bath in the middle of the night?” Why indeed. - I thought it was interesting that Theron is referred to as Woman in the credits, but Molly Parker is referred to as Motherly Woman. No one in the movie has an actual name (Man, Boy, Woman, Old Man, Gang Member, etc.), I just thought it was interesting that the person who adopts Boy after Man dies gets “motherly” and that Woman doesn’t despite being his actual mother, probably because she decides she’d rather kill herself than live a half-life in a post-apocalyptic world where survival is not the same as living.
- Also, I’m not sure that walking out into the cold winter night in a t-shirt and vanishing into the woods is the most effective way of killing yourself.
- They kept framing shots to make Viggo Mortensen look like National Geographic’s famous Afghan girl, although I’m not sure if this was intentional or not.
- I have difficulty reading the landscape as post-apocalyptic because, frankly, it looks like much of Canada in February, but with Canada having fewer abandoned buildings and presumably no cannibalism. It’s like being on the surface of the moon or Siberia. Perhaps this looks like the apocalypse to people who live in Hollywood and have the luxury of sunshine all year round.
- On the list of things that are not awesome, I’d put opening a cellar in hopes of finding food but instead finding emaciated naked people with their limbs gnawed off pretty high on that list. Holy Christ, cannibalism really, REALLY sucks. If you’re going to be a cannibal, you could at least have the decency to kill the person first. I guess the meat would go bad before you could eat it all, though, and that’s why it’s better to keep them alive and limbless. I just gave this way more thought than I ever thought I would. Gross.
- Surprise Robert Duvall is a surprise! And possibly the best part of the movie.
- The unexpected Crossbow of Awesome™ was exciting! I actually thought the woman had shot it but in the credits we see “Archer” and “Archer’s Wife”, so clearly the guy who got shot with the flare gun shot it.
- At times the score sounded a little too “Triumph of the Human Spirit” for my liking.
- There seems to be a miscredit at the end, as I’m pretty sure that Mugatu did the costumes for this movie.
The Road
Might have worked better as a silent movie.
IMDB Plot Synopsis A post-apocalyptic tale of a man and his son trying to survive by any means possible.